“Grrr”. “Naaaaa”. “Grrrnaaagh”. Did Rory McCann actually have any dialogue in Attila the Hun (BBC One)? He gouged, fought, scythed and maimed with lipsmacking fervour. He even, after a fruitful day’s rampaging, killed his own brother. But he didn’t do words. He tried to, but every attempt was cut short by another throat slitting/beheading/massacre. Isn’t blood on TV drama really, really good now? In the old days it was light and silly-looking. Now it’s thicker and in Attila, so many people were killed horribly we saw it gloop out of mouths, the platelets almost visible in hi-def, until the viewers may too have felt something unpleasant rising in their throats.
The idea behind this melding of fact and imagination (and there was a stern note at the outset reminding us of the serious research behind the drama) must be that we have become so stupid and lazy that we can’t take watching someone actually tell us what happened in history, it now has to be acted and must reference action movies (Gladiator) and Doctors (the dialogue) to keep us interested.
If this was supposed to chart the rise and fall of Attila the Hun, it failed: apart from constant battling and punching and stabbing - certainly that’s all that has passed down into historical folklore - the subject here was surprisingly threadbare. McCann just growled and pummelled for an hour. But if you wanted bone-crunching violence and epic battles, then you were in clover - and plaudits to the director Gareth Edwards who created it using computer trickery, rather than thousands of extras.
I mulled whether the accents ascribed to the characters were just a little bit racist: Attila, the murderous Hun, was Scottish, while all the emissaries from Rome with their fine grey hair and velvety cloaks were very Home Counties. Attila’s right-hand man, who he called “Eeeeecco” (Edeco), was a bit of a cheekychappie, salt-of-the-earth type. With plaits, that is... my goodness the girlie hair was like something out of a frightful Abba tribute band.
So I learnt that Attila was ruthless, I learnt that arrows in AD450 travelled ten miles to hit their victims from castle ramparts (unless CGI was an early invention of the Roman Empire) and I learnt that bellowed lines such as “Build my funeral pyyyyyre”, while not intended to be funny, can sometimes leave very juvenile viewers who are now very ashamed rolling on the floor with laughter.
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Summits (BBC Four) restored seriousness to history - well momentarily, until David Reynolds, Professor of International History at Cambridge University, did a barnstorming Russian accent. Wow, the Prof is a star in the making. He does pinstripe. Oh man, does he do pinstripe... He does pinstripe, actually, and open-neck shirt. Only a certain kind of dude can pull that off.
His pitch-perfect diction, both in this week’s trawl through what happened when Reagan met Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985 and last week when Kennedy met Khrushchev, genuinely brings history alive. He and his team have thoroughly researched their subjects and stud the grand sweep of history with brilliant detail. With authority and ?lan, the Professor revealed why the summit was important - it hinged on the “palpable chemistry between the two men and the close relationships of their advisers - while also putting it in historical context (Reagan’s “schizoid” attitude to the Russians, before, and the collapse of communism afterwards).
The central sticking point at the Geneva summit, gingerly traversed, was Reagan’s refusal to give up the Strategic Defence Initiative (or SDI, also known as Star Wars - a flying shield he envisioned as blasting nasty missiles heading America’s way).
Their animosity would melt, then reignite. Professor Reynolds played the role of both men and gave them accents, which were spot-on and funny. And he played Raisa and Nancy, too (not in drag), delivering the latter’s “Who does that dame think she is?” put-down with brassy brio. Reynolds isn’t as arch as David Starkey yet, but he is as nippy - and his instinct to zero in on the personal and colourful (Reagan’s choice to divest himself of his winter coat when meeting Gorbachev for the first time; the flying in of the negotiating table from the UN) means history is animated and vivid without the need for CGI. The pinstripe - yes, I am jealous of the pinstripe - is visual effect enough.
Out of the Box
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Of course, Lily Allen couldn’t host a normal chat show with guests and, er, chat. This being BBC Three, there would have to be conceits - the audience are cyber-friends, there’s a “bar” that serves as a VIP area of a kind and where the favoured few lounge, and there’s Lily, giggling and gurgling and saying weird, kooky things to her guests. Peep Show’s David Mitchell was game enough on opening night to watch internet clips of animals having sex and endure the most inane of questioning. This viewer wasn’t so forgiving and turned instead to a cheerful documentary about people jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge.
An unfashionable afterthought from the latest flaring of the Radio 4-is-too-middle-class debate: what’s wrong with Radio 4 being middle-class? A lot of us like it the way it is.